How Adapting to the Realities of the Evolving B2B Buyer's Journey Drove 10X Results for this CMO

Eric Eden:
0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Chuck Moxley. He has been a chief marketing officer for over 25 years and he is an expert in the intersection of technology and marketing and expert in digital marketing and digital identity. Welcome to the show.

Chuck Moxley:
1:19

Thank you, Eric. I've been a marketing leader for 25 years, CMO for the last 10, but simple enough.

Eric Eden:
1:26

All good. Why don't you just share a little bit about yourself and why don't you just give us a little bit of context about who you are and what you do?

Chuck Moxley:
1:36

Sure, sure. I started out my career actually on the agency side, so I worked for several agencies for about 10 years and worked on a lot of consumer marketing actually a lot of big brain consumer marketing and then, back in the dot-com heyday, I went to what we would call today a B2B SaaS company software as a service. Back then we had different terminology for it, and I have pretty much been on the B2B side since this is I'm currently at my sixth B2B SaaS company, most of those being startups, and I've taken companies from 2 million to over 50 million. I've had a couple of exits in there and today I'm with a company called Blue Triangle and we help, like large enterprise brands, quantify friction on their website that's causing people to not convert and show them how to fix that.

Eric Eden:
2:30

Awesome. Let's jump right into a story about some of the marketing you've done that you're most proud of the best marketing you've done.

Chuck Moxley:
2:34

What I've been telling people is look, we had playbooks that for years worked, especially in lead gen, and the way we did it, I literally I went many years using the same playbook and literally about a year or two the whole playbook got up and it just wasn't working anymore. And I think there's a couple of things driving that. One is CEOs are demanding ROI fast, improving ROI faster, and they don't care about things like MQLs and leads and the typical marketing things that we report on. What they care about is pipeline and revenue right and leads and the typical marketing things that we report on. What they care about is pipeline and revenue right. And so it had to change the way we all report. And then I think the other piece of it is the buyers have changed and I don't know if anybody's talked on your podcast, has talked about the dark funnel, but this idea in Gardner I think their data is 78% of buyers will not reveal themselves until very late in the purchase process. That 78% of that process happens without a seller being involved or without you, the company, doing any kind of interaction. They want to do all that research on their own.

Chuck Moxley:
3:34

I've been there almost two years now, had not done any marketing. So we launched everything in January of last year for our first time and we launched with that traditional model and doing a lot of lead gen and we had success. We had good progress in Q1. But what we were seeing was we were getting a lot of crap leads like people putting in, like Nanya business at nanyabusinesscom, and we could put them on a sequence they would all bounce and nothing would happen. And just because they wanted access to the content, access to the ebook, and we were running on our paid media, we were running about 289 bucks a lead in Q1. So we tested in the last couple of weeks ungating a piece of content and we suddenly saw a big uptake in people doing that and we had been following what the market was doing.

Chuck Moxley:
4:18

And there's a book on it. Now she's a CMO at a company called Sixth Sense. It's called no Forms, no Spam, no, Something along those lines if you want to check it out. But I was reading that book and the whole market was shifting and we were moving to this dark funnel. So we at the beginning we ungated all of our content. But what we did and this was interesting we put it on it. We used a tool called Issue I-S-U it. We used a tool called Issue I-S-U. It's 30 bucks a month or something. It's cheap, but we took our e-books, put them in there and it allows you to make them flip books and you get all kinds of data on how many pages they consume and how long they stay on the content.

Chuck Moxley:
4:51

So we went from tracking leads to tracking what we call engagements and with engagements, that is, somebody visits that e-book and spends at least 30 seconds on it and changes pages, or they come to the website and consume more than one page something along those lines. The actual definitions and our cost per engagement for the rest of the year averaged 28. So we went from 289 bucks a lead to 28 engagement and what happened was we took away the the gate. We allowed a lot more people to discover the content they wanted to access content. They just weren't willing to give us the email address, and what I'm saying isn't necessarily revolutionary. It's all covered in this book and many other people out there talking about it. There's a guy, chris Walker, from Refined Labs, that does a lot of posts on it.

Chuck Moxley:
5:35

But I drank the Kool-Aid and so we split our funnel in Q2 to what we call demand gen and demand capture. And so in demand gen we're just trying to drive people to learn about our solution, to engage with our content, et cetera, and that's what we track as engagements and what we do on that issue pages. At the top of it we give them the option to give us their email address to email the ebook, and part of that is we're advertising, for example, on Facebook, and I get a lot of ads on Facebook at night. I'm not going to read an e-book at that point. I'll put in my email address. I'll read it tomorrow when I get back into the office. So we gave them the email and what we found is we were getting a lot of emails and now we're getting legitimate emails, and then we could put them on a sequence and still communicate with them. So it solved a lot of problems.

Chuck Moxley:
6:19

We quit reporting. I convinced my CEO. I'm not going to tell you any more lead numbers. I'm not going to tell you MQRs. I'm going to tell you two things how many inbound demo requests we're getting, because that's our first step. We're a sales-led motion. We don't do product-led growth or product-led sales motion because our price point. So how many inbound demo requests and how much pipeline we're driving. And obviously it's up to the sales team to close that pipeline.

Chuck Moxley:
6:43

And in our first year with a very small budget relatively small budget we saw just huge numbers. We produced on pipeline a return on our ad spend of 10X and on close one revenue. Right now we're running over 3X. So for every dollar we spend on media we've generated $3 in close one revenue and we were able to engage about 2000 of our ideal customer prospects last year. So we've and we and what we saw coming to this year, we're running about three and a half times. Actually we just got another deal yesterday. So about four times where we were at the end of Q1 last year, because we're recording this on the last day of the quarter. We're running four times ahead on pipeline that we were at the same time last year because of all the work we did last year in that demand jet. So it's just a different model, different way of thinking that I know there's a ton of discussion out there with people on LinkedIn. What I can tell you is, by sharing the data, it really worked for us.

Eric Eden:
7:37

Those are some remarkable results. I think that you're right. The discussion over the last several years has been that the buyer's journey is changing and people do want to do 80% of calls from SDRs. I think people are a lot more hesitant to just give out their email for gated content these days because so many people abuse it. Like you give your email for a piece of content and then they email you every single day for a month.

Eric Eden:
8:17

It's just like people are really dream and then. So of course, people react this way. They don't want to give out their details anymore, and so I think that the game has changed. What I want to say is that I think five years ago was very different, and then it is today. So if you were gotten a time machine, you would be doing completely different things today than you were and I was.

Chuck Moxley:
8:41

Yeah, we were running different playbooks. It was all about lead gen and the traditional model. And you're right, it's completely changed. And the problem I think with that was always just because I downloaded an e-book doesn't mean I'm ready to buy. And yet we put them into a sales motion and put them into a sequence going OK, ready to buy? Here's learn more about our platform to buy it. Here's learn more about our platform. I mean, half the time it's a college student downloading the book too. It's just doing a research paper. So it's, this model works because people self-select when they come and let them make themselves known and say I'm ready for a demo, I'm ready to engage.

Chuck Moxley:
9:13

What's interesting is, in part of convincing people to move to this model is you need the data to know who is coming to your website, who is engaging with your content, and there's a number of ways to get that today through Sixth Sense and a lot of tools out there that can identify anonymous visitors to your website. We actually use a reporting tool. We use a tool called HockeyStack that allows us to do that, and they actually get the Sixth Sense data. So when that person and this happens all the time now in the old days, somebody would fill out a demo request and it would just show as organic. We don't know what they did before that.

Chuck Moxley:
9:44

Now, what's great with HockeyStack? It stitches all that together. So as soon as we get their email address, it will tell us oh, you've been serving ads to them for three months. They've had over 30 impressions. They engage with your LinkedIn content. They came to your website, they went on 10 different pages of content and then they filled out the form. We can actually reverse engineer that and start to see what's driving those kinds of interactions and what our sales team is saying. When that person comes in for the demo, they know what we do.

Eric Eden:
10:17

They're much better leads than anything we do from like outbound prospecting and some of the other tools that we're using. I think it's good that you're just sharing now the number of demos and the amount of pipeline you're creating. I've always found it ponderous that management teams couldn't process activity metrics next to those data points in terms of just website visitors and MQLs and number of people who downloaded content. For me, operationally running the programs, they're just data points of okay, it's activity, you can see what's coming potentially. But when you share them with people outside of marketing, like the CEO or other people in leadership, they feel like you're trying to spin them or something and you're trying to claim that they're actually pipeline or demos, and that's never been the point. But I think if you can get people to understand activity metrics and pipeline metrics, that's great. If you can't just give them the pipeline metrics Exactly.

Chuck Moxley:
11:11

Those are leading indicators. And if you don't have a CEO who understands marketing and in my case I don't he just doesn't have a marketing background and certainly a board the board. When I have these conversations with the board, they get very, they ask questions because they just don't understand the upstream stuff and, in the end, what they care about is revenue, right? So if that's what they care about, let's focus on the revenue metrics. That's what's going to matter.

Eric Eden:
11:33

And one more thing about gated versus non-gated content. I think podcasts in themselves are a great example of non-gated content. You can go onto Apple Podcasts or Spotify and listen to whatever you want and you don't have to give them your email address or fill out any forms, and I think that's great and I think that's why one of the reasons one of the many reasons that podcasts are popular is people just want to go in there and they want to get smart and they don't want to have to give their details in order to get smart. So I think that it's just a proof point that people want ungated content, right?

Chuck Moxley:
12:12

Yeah, it's part of that discoverability and that demand jet. So if it's a topic that you're interested in, you discover that because we actually launched a podcast in October last year and it's been just huge for us, and part of it is we've been successful in getting senior executives from major brands to all household brands you would recognize to come on the podcast. So now people out there and they go oh, I want to hear from that guy, from Eddie Bauer. We had a former chief marketing officer from Eddie Bauer. Oh, I want to hear what he has to say. Oh, that's interesting. We had a former chief marketing officer from Eddie Bauer. Oh, I want to hear what he has to say. Oh, that's interesting.

Chuck Moxley:
12:42

And in that we put a little commercial and we learn about it. And we built a podcast site that is separate and we can track the same metrics on that. So we have 478 companies that we're targeting this year with our marketing that we're running as to, et cetera. We can track which of those companies have actually come to the podcast site as well as to our website. So we get those leading indicators. If we still get the leading indicators, we need them from a marketing standpoint. We just don't.

Chuck Moxley:
13:06

We can report on that and we do show hope in saying, hey, we're engaging with it and we've built a whole different. We replaced the funnel with what I call a football field. It's a football field analogy goes left to right and we built a whole new model coming into this year where it was based on first engagement. So we had target. We had first engagement, repeat engagement, investigation or evaluation, where we see them coming to certain pages on our website that indicate they're really going deep on the platform, then demo request, then we do proof of concepts in most of our cases and then close one revenue. And that's what I'm now reporting on this year and I can show you the companies that are each state in that 478 that they're finding that interesting and useful.

Eric Eden:
13:48

Yeah, account-based marketing. In the last five years, forrester has started a whole new practice with a whole massive set of frameworks and research around ABM, and I think that's caused people to think differently about funnel and pipeline metrics. I like the football analogy. I hadn't heard that one before. So I think that's been a positive trend with ABM that people are willing to look at things a little bit differently, and it's very helpful. I think you had a second story you wanted to share with us as well. You shared one incredible story, but today's a double header episode, so why don't you share the second story, because I think it's a good one too.

Chuck Moxley:
14:29

You bet. So one of the things that has also changed and we can blame AI for this is everybody is getting it Us as decision makers and buyers. If you're not getting 20 or 30 of these AI powered emails where it goes, hey, how's it going? In Chandler, arizona, I love that restaurant, that steak restaurant and all that stuff that they're pulling in from all these different things to try to personalize the emails. It's become so hard to do outbound prospecting, plus all the clamping down on spam, that a lot of those traditional methods don't work. And what I have had success over the years and I'm dying to do and when I've got enough budget, we're going to be doing it is three-dimensional direct mail and I think it'll be killer today, more than even it was two or three years ago when we were doing it, because nobody's doing it anymore. And I'll give you an example.

Chuck Moxley:
15:17

I'll give you a quick campaign example. We were selling a product in the advertising space and one of our targets were ad agencies and we were working with the very largest agencies in New York, and so I went to our sales team and I said give me each seller to give me 20 prospects that they had been calling on at least six months they could not get a meeting with. So these were their hardest to get prospects right and we. So we ended up with 250 prospects in this list and we were rolling out a new concept of where we were going to guarantee the results from the campaign and if they didn't achieve the results, we would actually give them a credit on a future campaign. Nobody had done in the industry, so we wanted to make this big deal about this news. So we created a three-dimensional direct mailer and this is what it looked like and it went in an envelope that had a matching thing. I don't know if you can read that Open the box. That's all it says. And so if you open the box, what is a phone? It's an actual mobile phone, and in here is like the charger for the phone charge the phone and keep it sharp. Oops, by the way, buying 250 of these burner phones.

Chuck Moxley:
16:23

We looked like drug dealers. It took a lot of work to just source them Because we unfortunately look like drug dealers, and we loaded one contact onto the phone and the contact was the seller that had been. So what would happen? And we had the seller send a text in advance to this phone number so that when they turn on the phone it would prompt the text would come in and say hey, I'm looking forward to chatting with you, I'll give you a call in the next 24 hours. And then we had a system in place to then alert the seller it's time to make a call. And when they called they said look, we're rolling out something, and there's a little bit of copy in the box to say this, but it was really a teaser. We're rolling out something so revolutionary it's not been done in the industry.

Chuck Moxley:
17:05

I would love to get a meeting with you no-transcript with the meeting it had, and from that campaign we drove $2 million in revenue from prospects we couldn't even get a meeting with for six months. After trying, and I think we out of the 250, we got about 65 meetings out of it, so it was just super successful. Now, this is not cheap. These packages were about a hundred dollars each and there was a some follow on communication, so it was an expensive campaign. I think we spent about 30 grand on the campaign. So it's expensive to go after 250 people but two million dollars in revenue. I do that all day long it's a good investment.

Eric Eden:
18:07

I don't like to think about it as a spend. I'd like to think about as an investment. If you can invest 30k and get 2 million, that's a great investment and I love this story. It's definitely memorable and remarkable because of the results it generated. But the bottom line is incentives work and it's just a fact because it causes people to prioritize the time. It's not necessarily that people couldn't go out and buy their own burner phone or iPad, but it just causes people to say you know what, I'll prioritize that 30 minutes. And if you have a good enough product and service that, if you're confident that you can win let's call it one out of every three or four people you pitch then the economics makes sense. Like you said right, you get those at-bats.

Chuck Moxley:
18:55

Absolutely, and if you can hit the home run from those at-bats.

Eric Eden:
18:59

It makes a lot of sense, right.

Chuck Moxley:
19:01

Yeah, and we ran a number of those. We have one I can't show you. It's a giant, it's a coffee cup this big that came in a box and again it was about a $70 package. We were shipping 20 of those a week and we were getting three meetings a week from that. Just because it was so novel. It came in and people were posting on social media like it became their candy dish at the agency or it became what they won. They had a cat sleeping at it. The agency cat sleeping in this giant coffee cup of course had our logo on it. So it's a breakthrough.

Chuck Moxley:
19:29

It has to the things that we learned in it is it can't just be a gift for a gift's sake, like I've had people just say, hey, I'll send you a bottle of wine Interesting, but I don't. I can't connect your what you, the dots to what you do. So it has to connect to what you do, and it's a little harder today in the work from home. But there are ways around that, right, and there are companies that can do this. But I'm telling you I I think this would kill today, because so many people are tired of just getting all bombarded with emails and cold calls and all the typical stuff that we've done. This stands out.

Eric Eden:
19:59

Yeah, I think email is getting a lot tougher the crackdown that Google launched in February.

Eric Eden:
20:13

A lot of people are saying that it's the equivalent of what happened to online advertising with the iOS 14 update.

Eric Eden:
20:16

It's so tight right now to get emails through that people who are sending all these silly emails aren't going to be sending them for very much longer.

Eric Eden:
20:22

If they're sending them, they're not going to be received because they're just getting so tight. Google and Microsoft, which have a majority of the market share, are so tight right now that these silly emails just won't get through. So if you want to get through to people and get the meetings and get the business, I think the sort of innovative thing with direct mail can get people's attention, and some of the companies that do this Sendoso is one of them that has these fulfillment things and the sleight of hand they have just because of COVID is that a lot of times they'll send an email and ask people to confirm their postal address so they can send them something. Yeah, and that is like a small nuance that I've seen a lot of companies that are thinking about doing things like this do, because people it's hard to know sometimes what office people work in or if they're working remotely or whatnot, but I think there's nuances like that that make it next generation, like in terms of classic direct mail, right.

Chuck Moxley:
21:27

That's a definite workaround. We used Sendoso my last company and did that same approach, that exact approach with the emails, and that's the workaround for today. So I think it's definitely doable and I do think it will stand out, and I just don't think anybody's doing it. That's the biggest part.

Eric Eden:
21:44

Yeah, it's a great way to stand out, to be different, in an ocean of sameness out there. It is. That's great, it's so old school though you know it is great, it's a little bit it is a little bit old school. You also have a book. Tell us a little bit about your book and your podcast sure.

Chuck Moxley:
22:03

So book over the my shoulder right here is called an audience of one. Uh, published about it. It's been almost two years now, I think. That are published by mcgraw hill and I co-wrote it with a guy named jamie turner who I've known for decades. Published about it. It's been almost two years now, I think. That are published by McGraw-Hill and I co-wrote it with a guy named Jamie Turner, who I've known for decades, great marketing expert. It was his fourth book and my first and it's on one-to-one marketing. It's on this idea that the world has changed and we talk a lot about the paradigm shifts in the world and that now personalization, that one-to-one, and there's a chapter on B2B, but it also covers a lot of B2C marketing. But that was a lot of fun to write. It's available on Amazon if you want to pick up a copy.

Eric Eden:
22:39

And you have a podcast too. I have a podcast, yeah.

Chuck Moxley:
22:42

Yeah, so we launched our podcast in October. It's called the Frictionless Experience. So if you are responsible in your company for driving friction out of your digital experience, whatever is preventing somebody from converting? That's what we talk about. We interview experts from top brands and we've done B2B. We just had last. Last episode was on B2B. So we do B2B. We do, obviously, consumer brands, but just some great tips and things you can find at the frictionless experiencecom or on your favorite podcast platform, spotify, etc.

Eric Eden:
23:16

Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing both these stories and your insights today. We really appreciate it. Encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends. They should hear these stories and check out his book and his podcast as well. Thanks so much for being with us today. We appreciate it.